


Never Know If You Don't Ever Try Again

by Nalanzu



Series: Ninjas Don't Need Coffee [3]
Category: Power Rangers Ninja Storm
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Horror, M/M, Short & Sweet, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 20:02:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nalanzu/pseuds/Nalanzu
Summary: After the events of Turn Around and Perfect Blue, the Rangers try again to go on a camping trip. It goes about as well as one might expect.





	Never Know If You Don't Ever Try Again

**Author's Note:**

> Third (and probably final) installment in this series of just-barely-shippy more-or-less-gen Ninja Storm stories.

“You realize this doesn’t count as camping, either.”

“That’s what you said last time.” Dustin didn’t quite shoulder Tori aside as he pulled his gear out of the back of her van, but only because she dodged in time. Their voices came through Shane’s audio feed clearly as he landed, releasing his transformation as soon as his feet touched the ground. He winced at the sun shining directly in his eyes and raised a hand to shade them, turning to face Tori’s van instead. One of the roads to reach the campsite hadn’t been marked, and he’d taken to the air to figure out where they were supposed to go. Shane only felt a little guilty about the use of superpowers for non-fighting-evil-related purposes, since it wasn’t as though either Sensei or the general public could see them up in the mountains.

“You had a generator,” Tori reminded him, voice sounding slightly muffled once it was no longer being fed directly into Shane’s ears. “And a television.” She reached around the back seat for one of the remaining coolers and followed Dustin into the cabin.

“Oh, right, no TV. Because you broke it,” came Hunter’s voice, barely audible through the open door.

“I said I was sorry!” Tori’s voice carried through more clearly than Hunter’s did. Shane rolled his eyes at what he was pretty sure was good-natured bickering and hopped into the van to see what was left. The rest of the team had gotten nearly everything, with the sole exception of Dustin’s backpack, wedged under the front seat. Shane looked at it for a second, thought about it for a second, and then sighed before tugging it free.

The bag ripped down the side, spilling its contents all over the floor of the van. As if summoned, Dustin appeared behind him. “Dude, you didn’t.”

“It was an accident,” Shane protested, and had a sudden flash of sympathy for Tori.

“That was my favorite bag,” Dustin said, and only then appeared to realize his underwear was on full display. It was colorful, too, brightly patterned boxers that – if Shane had had to guess on pain of death – he would have pegged as very very _Dustin_ without having seen them first. “Aw, man,” Dustin said, trying and failing to salvage his gear. “You couldn’t have broken the one with my riding gear in it?”

“You’d rather I’d broken your riding gear,” Shane said, deadpan, and watched Dustin’s face shift from chagrin to horror to annoyance in the space of half a second.

“The riding gear wouldn’t have broken,” Dustin said. “Just the bag.”

Shane held up his hands in defeat. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Are you guys done?” Tori had reappeared while Shane wasn’t looking, and by now he’d just accepted the fact that he would never, ever hear her coming. He could more or less keep tabs on the rest of the team by how they interacted with their elements, subtle ripples in the surroundings, but Tori had always been like a ghost. “The van needs to go to the shop and I promised Cam a ride into town.”

“Or neither of you would be out here, I know.” Shane snagged a stray pair of Dustin’s hopefully clean socks from the floorboards and gave the van a once-over. “I think that’s everything.”

“Then we’ll see you guys in a couple of days.” Tori smiled, and Shane grinned back at her. Their first failed camping trip was about to be nothing more than a distant memory, when their second camping trip eclipsed it in awesomeness.

Shane clapped her on the shoulder, realizing too late that he was still holding Dustin’s socks, and Tori gave him a look of long-suffering disgust. Shane backed off, heading toward the cabin. “Hey, Cam! Tori’s ready to go!”

“I came all the way out here for this?” Cam was saying when Shane threw open the door to what the cabin thought was a living room; all Shane could see of Cam was his legs, sticking out from underneath what might have been a table and might have been an entertainment center. The screen in the middle of the wooden monstrosity flickered to life, sound pouring out of it, and Cam pushed himself free of the mess with alacrity, hands over his ears. “Ow,” he said, the word drowned out by cheers from the motocross contingent.

“Nice work!” Hunter slapped Cam’s shoulder and then snatched his hand away as if he’d been burned. Dustin followed the very brief second of awkwardness with a hug that lifted Cam off his feet and a grin that threatened to break his face.

“You fixed it!” he crowed, and Cam struggled free of his grip, straightening his shirt with a death glare that Dustin didn’t appear to notice.

“Yes. Yes, I did.” Cam blinked and noticed Shane. “Did you say Tori’s ready to go?”

“Just waiting on you.” Shane jerked his thumb in the direction of the door.

“Right.” Cam hesitated, looking around the room. Shane followed his gaze, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The small kitchenette in the corner was overflowing with plastic bags, the futon on the other side of the room had been piled high with their duffel bags, and the door to the sleeping area in the back of the cabin was closed. The door to the tiny bathroom was cracked open, Shane saw, but when he looked back Cam was hastily looking away from Hunter. “I have to, um,” Cam said, and nearly tripped on the round table pretending not to take up space between the kitchenette and the outer door.

“See you on Tuesday!” Shane yelled after him, but the door banged shut on his words. “Sure, be weird, then,” he muttered.

“Weird?”

Having heard Hunter coming, Shane did not jump. He looked calmly over his shoulder at Hunter’s too-close face and smirked. “I get the top bunk,” he said, and bolted for the bedroom door.

“In your dreams,” Hunter returned, but Shane was way ahead of him. He snagged one of his bags off the futon and then was momentarily stymied by the door opening outward instead of inward, giving Hunter the chance to catch up. Shane pushed him backwards, but Hunter caught his wrist and the two of them tumbled through the door almost at the same time. Shane flung his bag on one of the top bunks, only to find that Hunter had claimed the other.

Shane climbed to his feet, adjusting his shirt and trying to give the impression that he’d done all of it on purpose. From the look on Hunter’s face, he didn’t think he was pulling it off. Through the closer window, Shane caught a glimpse of Tori’s blue van, still parked in front of the cabin, and he frowned.  _What’s she still doing here?_ He opened his mouth to say something, but Hunter spoke first.

“I’m a little worried about Blake.”

Shane looked at the door behind him; Dustin was visible, responsibly putting perishable items in the refrigerator, but none of the other three were apparently in the cabin. “Because of that thing,” he said, keeping his voice down anyway.

“Lothor messed with his head pretty good.” Hunter reached out to pull the door mostly closed, and then silently pulled it all the way closed.

“Didn’t help when he kept vanishing to train with your graduate student buddy,” Shane said.

“Leanne.” Hunter supplied the name absently. “Most graduates stay – I mean, most people who leave don’t really graduate. Most of the graduates stay to be teachers.”

“Same with us.” Shane checked the window again, but the van was still there. “He seems okay, though,” he offered.

“Yeah, but still.” Hunter grimaced. “He’s my little brother.”

“You gotta trust him.” Shane smiled encouragingly, or he at least tried, because as far as he could tell, Blake had bounced back from being kidnapped pretty well. He’d been subjected to a number of twisted hallucinations, each one building on the last, in an attempt to shatter his grip on reality, but Blake had pulled through. The time he’d spent talking to their mentor probably helped, Shane reflected; Sensei had a solid grasp on the human mind and how to handle crises, and he’d pulled Blake aside more than once in the weeks since his abduction. “And Sensei,” Shane added, when Hunter just kept staring at him.

“I guess,” Hunter said. “There’s, uh. Something else.”

“Okay?” Shane was genuinely confused, now, but before he could say anything further, the door opened abruptly. Hunter flinched, looking guilty for no reason Shane could see, and Cam stepped into the room.

“The van is broken,” Cam announced, not looking at Hunter.

“What?” Shane pushed his way past his teammates and out the front door, to where the van’s hood had been propped open. Blake and Dustin were arguing, Dustin pointing at the engine, and Tori was sitting in the driver’s seat with her head pressed against her forearms.

“I knew this was going to happen,” she said, pointing at Shane without looking as he approached. Shane didn’t question it. “I knew if I drove all the way up here, something would go wrong.”

“Hey, we have three awesome mechanics here,” Shane said, trying to cheer her up. “And a tech genius.” Not that he didn’t know his way around an engine, but the other four guys were better than he was, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. “Someone can get your van running.”

“No, we can’t,” Dustin said.

“What do you mean, no, we can’t.”

“Look,” Blake was saying, and pointing at something entirely different. “That would at least get the van moving again.”

“And when it breaks and they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere? No way, dude, we need someone to bring the part here so we can fix it.” Dustin shook his head. “Even I know that’s not going to work.”

“Dustin’s probably right,” Cam said, sounding pained. “We’re stuck up here until we can replace the -”

“I don’t care what part it is,” Tori said, pushing herself upright. “I just want another one, so I can drive out of here.” 

“We could just.” Dustin wiggled his hand. “And then come back with it.”

“Ninja powers in public cause nothing but trouble,” Cam said, throwing Shane a sidelong glance. Shane made a face at him, but Cam wasn’t done. “Remember what happened last time.”

“Okay, but like, last time, Tori wasn’t the reason Hunter and Blake got stuck in the popcorn,” Dustin pointed out, ignoring Shane’s transformation entirely, which was technically accurate given the lack of ninja powers in the transformation system, and also probably the reason Cam looked as though the words were hurting him physically.

The conversation devolved into arguing about whether or not it was acceptable to use their ninja abilities to buy whatever it was that Tori’s van needed, and Shane would have been part of it, except that he was suddenly distracted by the thick fog rolling in. “Guys,” he said, looking around. He couldn’t feel anything off with his extra senses, and sometimes the weather changed rapidly in the mountains. No one listened. Shane rolled his eyes and raised his voice. “Guys!”

The argument came to a halt, the other five Rangers blinking at him in confusion. “Dude, you don’t have to yell,” Dustin said. “We’re right here.”

Shane resisted the urge to tell Dustin exactly what he thought of that particular situational assessment. “Maybe Tori and Cam should just stay here tonight,” he said. “Weather’s changing.”

“Does it look weird to you?” Tori asked.

“Maybe?” Shane scratched his head. “Ask Sensei if he can see anything from Ninja Ops, I guess.”

“Let’s not ask my father to touch my computer,” Cam said, and raised his communicator. He turned his back, toward the thickening fog, and Shane heard him muttering to CyberCam briefly before glaring at the vanishing skyline as though it had offended him. "CyberCam says there's nothing," he reported. 

The horizon was indistinct, swathed in grayish-white mist softening the setting sun to an incandescent halo. Shane eyed the trees, uneasy, but he couldn't tell where the fog was rolling in from. The sky directly overhead was pale blue, fading into colorlessness as he watched, and the outline of the cabin barely thirty feet away lost its sharpness.

"So maybe we stay here overnight," Cam said, unhappily. "None of you brought an extra toothbrush, did you."

"Or we could just run down the mountain," Tori said. "It's not like anyone could see us in the fog."

"Popcorn bucket," Dustin reminded her, and she smacked him in the arm.

"That had nothing to do with it and you know it."

"I'm going to head down," Cam said suddenly, and Shane twitched in surprise. For all that Cam had been the most openly defiant one of all of them, by refusing to stay in a pure support role in Ninja Ops, he could be more rigid than the rest of them about sticking to protocol. "Don't make that face at me, Shane," he said. "I only follow the rules when there's a good reason for it."

"Are you sure you're not psychic?" Shane muttered, and Cam sighed.

"Tori's right," he said. "No one's going to see us in this. And it’s not like it bothered you twenty minutes ago when Shane was _flying over the trees_ to find the road."

"Yeah, but you can't see where you're going," Shane pointed out. "You're gonna run face-first into a tree."

"No, I won't." Cam looked at the blurred outlines of the cabin for a brief moment and adjusted his morpher on his wrist. “I’ll pick up the part for the van,” he added. “See you guys tomorrow.”

“You staying, Tor?” Shane asked.

Tori glanced at the darkening sky, and the wall of fog around them. “I – yeah,” she said. “Cam, you sure you don’t -”

“See you tomorrow,” Cam said, and gave them a half smile paired with a sardonic little salute. He turned and started running, vanishing into the mist almost immediately.

A chill ran over Shane’s skin, and he felt an almost overwhelming urge to call Cam back to the cabin, where he could keep an eye on his entire team. _Stop that_ , he told himself. _Cam is perfectly capable of getting home on his own._

“No, I’m not sleeping in there with you,” Tori was saying, when Shane dragged his attention back to his immediate surroundings. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Only four beds,” Dustin said. 

“And a futon. On the other side of a closed door. Which is where I will be,” Tori told him. “If you try to tell me I’m _one of the guys_ one more time -”

“I would never,” Blake said, and Shane saw Tori actually soften and smile as they walked toward the cabin, hands casually linked together. 

The inside of the small room was crowded, with five of them in it; the first attempt at making dinner was a chaotic mess and whatever Cam had done to fix the electronics hadn’t retrieved any sort of signal from outside. Shane was ready for it, with a stack of movies, and Dustin had apparently had the same idea, which only added to the noise. Tori eventually sorted them out, and once they had all been assigned tasks, Shane noticed Hunter looking repeatedly at the small window over the kitchen sink.

“What?” Shane asked, from the table near the door. He couldn’t see anything but fog out of the double-wide panes next to the door itself, except for the shadowy outlines of the porch, and he didn’t think Hunter could see anything either.

“Nothing,” Hunter said, and lifted the lid on the portable grill again.

“Bro, stop that, it’s going to take forever if you don’t leave it shut.” Blake reached past them to smack his brother’s hand, and Hunter brandished his spatula.

“Don’t tell me how to cook in my own kitchen,” he said.

“Not your kitchen,” Dustin muttered, barely audible from across the room, but it was Blake that started arguing with Dustin about who had temporary ownership of their rented cabin while Hunter returned to staring at the window again.

Shane put his roll of paper towels down and stepped the very short distance across the room to stand next to Hunter. “What?” he said again, under cover of Tori turning on Dustin to side with Blake.

“What?” Hunter glared at him, but Shane was used to Hunter’s expressions by now.

“You keep looking at the window. You’re all distracted. It’s weird. What gives?” Shane checked the window again, but no, nothing but fog.

“Cam didn’t check in,” Hunter said, so softly Shane almost didn’t hear it. 

“Seriously? That’s what -” Shane rolled his eyes and tapped at his morpher. “Yo, Cam.” No sound came back, not even the hiss of an open and unanswered connection. Shane frowned and pressed the appropriate button again. “Hey, Cam.”

The morpher might have been a piece of decorative art for all the function it was currently displaying, and Shane shook his wrist slightly just in case something had gotten loose.

“What’s up?” 

The argument across the room had stopped, with a single solitary piece of popcorn stuck in Dustin’s hair and a few on the floor, and Shane held up his morpher in explanation. “It’s not connecting.” 

“Let me try.” Tori couldn’t get through to either Cam or Ninja Ops either. “That’s really weird.”

“Can we reach each other from here?” Dustin asked, and Shane was about to tell him what a ridiculous question it was, when they were all standing in the same room, but Hunter motioned Blake to stand in the bedroom and tried to contact him through the morpher.

“Nothing,” Blake called through the door. “It’s like it’s totally broken.”

“Great,” Shane said. “Anybody got a cell phone?” 

Both Tori and Hunter actually  _had_ cell phones, neither of which Shane had known about, but Hunter waved his in their general direction as soon as he unearthed it from the bottom of one of his bags. “No reception,” he said, pushing buttons on it anyway. “Nothing.”

“Mine’s in the van,” Tori said. “Be right back.” 

The door closed behind her with a sound of finality, echoing across the small room more than the wooden floor could account for, and Shane barely stopped himself from flinching. “I’m gonna just,” he said after a few moments, not quite long enough for Tori to make it to the van and back, and opened the door before anyone could poke fun at him for paranoia.

The fog had gotten thicker, while they’d been inside, or maybe it was just that the sun had set. Shane couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of his face, and once he’d stepped away from the cabin, he only knew where it was because the windows were lit up from the inside. It made a bright spot, and he oriented himself along its lines.

“So the van should be over there,” he said under his breath, and walked purposefully forward despite the crawling sensation between his shoulderblades. “Hey, Tori!”

Silence from the morphers was one thing, but having Tori not answer moved the vague sense of apprehension into full-blown worry. Shane swallowed hard and shouted again.

“Tori!”

The van loomed out of the mist in front of him, and Shane nearly walked right into it before he saw it. He clipped his knee on the open driver’s side door anyway, and he cursed, hopping on one foot for a second until the pain faded into a dull throb. He could feel warm wetness trickle down his leg, and he reached down to feel a tear in his pants overlying a  gash in his skin.

“Great,” he said. Tori wasn’t in the van, and neither was her cell phone, as far as Shane could tell. “Maybe I just missed her coming back,” he said out loud, but his voice sounded flat in his own ears. He swallowed, trying to clear them. It didn’t help. Shane closed the van door as loudly as he could, but it didn’t sound right either. “Tori!” he tried again.

The dull glow of the cabin wasn’t where he’d thought it was when he turned around; it beckoned him from a few degrees too far to the left, and Shane wouldn’t have thought twice about it except for the communicators being down and Tori not answering and the van door being left carelessly open when Tori was the one of them who was the most careful about her civilian possessions. He glared at it, and then at the fog surrounding him, and raised his wrist in a familiar gesture. Something had gone wrong, and he wasn’t going to sit idly by. Whether or not the fog and whatever might have been in it was Lothor’s work, Shane was pretty sure he was fully justified in using his Ranger powers to handle it.

Before Shane could morph, something he couldn’t see struck him hard and sent him staggering into the side of the van. Only the fact that he’d already been moving, already been preparing for the transformation, let the blow hit him in the shoulder instead of the jaw. A flickering afterglow arced from the metal of the van across his morpher and dissipated into the ground, leaving behind the scent of burning  leaves . Shane picked himself up, looking around for whatever it had been, but he couldn’t see anything except the fog. 

“Show yourself!” he shouted, stepping away from the van. 

The lack of answer from whatever had hit him was nearly as unnerving as not knowing where two of his teammates had gone. Shane raised his communicator to call the others before he remembered that it wasn’t working –  _it’s not broken, it’s being jammed_ , he realized – and a brief change in the air pressure around him was all the warning he had. He ducked away from the van before whatever it was hit him again, and the side of the van caved in.  _Tori’s going to be pissed_ , Shane found himself thinking, and he glanced toward the cabin.

His dodge had taken him away from it, and he started running toward the dim glow, weaving back and forth. Every strike missed him, but he couldn’t seem to get any closer to reaching the rest of his teammates. The ground under his feet rumbled, throwing him off balance, and Shane wished for a split second that he had more of an affinity for Dustin’s element before the earth erupted and flung him down.

The light from the cabin was only a dim glow when Shane rolled to his feet, and he looked around automatically before starting toward it. The same dim glow was repeated, a few spots looking closer and others farther away, and the bottom sunk out of Shane’s stomach. The fog itself was glittering, and he had no idea where the cabin was. He couldn’t see the van, either, no landmarks, nothing but eerie patches of luminescence.

“I have to find Tori,” he muttered, and then remembered that Cam had vanished into the mist, too. “I have to find both of them. And warn everyone else.”

If Shane was lucky, no one else would come outside the dubious protection of the cabin to investigate the disappearance of half of their team, but Shane had precisely zero faith in that particular bit of luck holding. He took a deep breath and spit out the words as rapidly as he could, giving whatever was waiting for him as little warning as possible and zig-zagging toward the closest patch of luminescence as he tried to morph for the second time.

“Ninja Storm! Ranger form!”

The familiar energy swept over him, red crackling along the edges of his vision and burning away the fog, and Shane felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet as the armor settled over his skin.  _This isn’t right_ warred with  _at least I can morph_ in the brief seconds before his feet landed hard on the ground and he staggered. The armor dropped away, and Shane blinked in the suddenly brilliant late afternoon sunlight shining almost directly in his eyes.

“What?” he said out loud, and his vision cleared. His knee throbbed for a moment and then the pain faded into a dull background ache, and Shane forgot about it entirely.

“I said, it doesn’t count as camping,” Tori said, from where she stood flattened against the side of the van as Dustin carried his gear into the cabin. Shane blinked, and then blinked again, looking from the undamaged van to the clear sky and wincing at the sunlight in his eyes again. “Shane!” 

Tori had gotten right up in front of Shane without his noticing it and was snapping her fingers in front of his eyes. Shane flinched back slightly, and relief that she was okay and standing in front of him warred with confusion. “You’re okay,” he said past the thickness he could feel in his throat. “Are you okay?” 

Tori’s shoulders were warm and solid under his hands, as though the past few hours had been nothing but a bad dream, and he couldn’t stop himself from pulling her into a rough hug. “Uh, Shane?” Tori patted his back hesitantly and then carefully extricated herself. “You okay there?”

“I, uh.” Shane cleared his throat, willing the faint hint of moisture out of his eyes. “Nothing. Never mind.” It was possible that what had to be a vivid hallucination was a punishment for using his suit for personal gain – team gain, technically, he thought. The sun shone steadily overhead, lending a sense of unreality to the memory of the rapid fog rolling in and Tori vanishing between the cabin and the van. “This totally counts as camping,” he added, because Tori was still giving him a dubious look.

“Right,” Tori said, drawing out the vowel with a level of sarcasm normally belonging to Cam. “We should get the rest of the _camping gear_ into the cabin.” 

“You should stay,” Shane said. “It’ll be fun.” 

“I have to take the van into the shop?” Tori reminded him. “And Cam needs the ride into town. Come on, get your butt in gear. It’s getting late.”

“Right.” Shane glanced around, but Tori was already lifting the last cooler out of the back of the van, and the only piece of gear left was Dustin’s backpack wedged under the front seat. Shane frowned at it, unable to remember if he had dreamed – _hallucinated?_ \- the backpack under the same seat before he shrugged. It had to go inside either way, and deliberately leaving it after Dustin had clearly forgotten it would have been unkind. He tugged carefully, frowning again as it met unexpected resistance. “How did you even do this,” he said, reaching under the seat to untangle the straps.

“Hey, did you see my – oh, sweet,” Dustin said, appearing as if summoned and taking the backpack. “You found it.” 

“Was it missing?” Shane asked, and Dustin rolled his eyes. 

“Dude,” he said, as if that meant something more than the word, and hugged the backpack to his chest. “This is my favorite bag.” 

“It’s exactly the same -” Shane said, and Dustin gave him a mournful look.

“Dude,” he said again, and backed away, petting the bag. “He didn’t mean it.”

“You get weirder every day,” Tori told him, having materialized without Shane noticing. A pit started to open in Shane’s stomach; deja vu was one thing, but having events play out almost exactly as he’d hallucinated them was starting to make him nervous.

“Hey, take that back,” Dustin said. “You’ll hurt its feelings.”

“Shane,” Tori said. “Back me up here.”

“Tori’s right,” Shane said absently, going with the answer least likely to get him into trouble and trying to remember what, exactly, had happened next. Tori had come outside and he’d gone to tell Cam that she was leaving, even though she’d just been inside the cabin – where Cam was – and presumably told him the same thing.

“Just for that, you don’t get to watch the television Cam hooked up,” Dustin informed him, and the hallucination-memory pinged at Shane’s thoughts again. He remembered walking into the cabin to see Cam buried under an entertainment center.

“He’s doing what?” Shane asked, and was running for the cabin door before he could help himself.

“That didn’t sound like excitement!” Dustin was right behind him, correctly reading the apprehension in Shane’s voice and – despite a total lack of understanding of Shane’s thought process – taking up a defensive position at his right shoulder, ready to back him up. Tori was half a beat behind them both.

“No,” Shane said, not sure if he was telling them this wasn’t a fight or if he was trying to tell the universe that it had done something wrong. Cam was wriggling free of the entertainment center with his hands over his ears as sound poured out of the speakers and Hunter and Blake clapped and whistled.

“Ow,” Cam said, and glanced at the door Shane had thrown open. “You’re welcome,” he said, and then he caught sight of Shane’s expression.

“You fixed it!” Hunter said, not catching the byplay and slapping Cam on the shoulder. He pulled his hand back as though he’d been burned, and then faltered, looking between Shane and Cam in confusion. “What’s Lothor doing now?” he said, sounding resigned. 

“Nothing,” Shane said automatically, and then, “I don’t know.” He hadn’t booked the cabin – that had been Hunter – and he hadn’t been inside it before, if his vision right before landing hadn’t been real. He’d ignored the vague sense of guilt and taken a few extra minutes to enjoy the sun and the sky and the feeling of flying; it had been long enough for the rest of the team to unload the van and for Cam to do whatever it was he’d done to the television. Despite never having seen the inside of the cabin, the layout matched his vision exactly, down to the one chair shoved against the wall. “Does this seem -” Shane hesitated. “Familiar?” he finished in a rush, the syllables spilling over each other.

“Familiar?” The questioning voice was Dustin. “Like, how, exactly?”

“Like we did this before,” Shane said.

“Last time we had a tent,” Dustin said, pushing past him into the cabin and dropping his intact backpack on the overflowing futon. “I know you remember that. Tori backed the van into the generator.” 

“I’m not talking about last time,” Shane said. “I’m talking about this time. Didn’t we do this already?”

“I think we would know if we did this already,” Dustin said, but his voice was uncertain. He looked around at the rest of the team, seeming relieved when no one else appeared any less confused. “Right?” he added.

“We have definitely not done this before,” Cam said finally. “I would have remembered how much trouble it was getting a guinea pig to sign a receipt.”

“How has that never come up before?” Blake said, just as Shane opened his mouth to insist that he knew what he was talking about.

“This,” Tori said, circling around and standing in front of Shane before he could get so much as a syllable out, “is why you need the break.” She poked him in the forehead, staring at one eye and then the other, before rocking back on her heels. “I’ll see you guys in a couple days. Cam, you ready?”

“Sure,” Cam said. “Try not to trip and fall into any holes before we get back.”

“Ha, ha,” Blake said, but he was looking at Tori. “Stay safe.” 

“You, too,” Tori said, and Dustin groaned out loud. 

“You can say goodbye outside where we can’t see you,” he said to them both, and Tori blushed. Shane was swept up in the general stampede pushing Tori and Blake out the front door, and then Hunter grabbed his arm and yanked him into the bedroom.

“What are you doing?” Shane shook him loose, eyeing the mostly-closed door. Hunter was staring at him with a level of attention and focus intense enough that Shane thought he might be able to actually feel it. 

“Is there something going on I should know about?” Hunter asked.

“I – what?” Shane blinked. “I think I might have had a vision of the future,” he said, aiming for the most plausible explanation he could find. “But you asked me about Blake, in it.”

Hunter opened his mouth, then closed it without saying a word and ran his hands through his hair. “Run that by me again,” he said, finally. 

“Visions of the future,” Shane repeated. “Like, I ripped Dustin’s bag, but this time I knew it was going to rip so I untangled it from under the seat, and I knew what the inside of the cabin looked like, and – oh, no.” 

“What?” Hunter’s face was a mix of alarm and skepticism.

“I think I know why,” Shane said, but before he could start to explain, the door flew into the wall. 

Shane flinched, drawing away from Hunter, and Hunter stepped back to give them both enough space to maneuver, and Shane remembered who had slammed the door open in his vision. “Cam,” he said, and Cam was in the doorway looking at them both with something that might have been disappointment before he hastily smoothed his face. 

“The van won’t start,” he said. 

“See, I was about to say that,” Shane told Hunter, and Cam frowned at them both. 

“One of us can fix it,” Hunter said, and pushed his way out the door. 

“No, you can’t!” Shane followed, leaving Cam to bring up the rear. “Whatever part you need, you don’t have it.” 

“Whatever.” Hunter had a head start and Shane let him reach the van and draw the same conclusion. He watched as Hunter argued with Blake, backed up by Dustin, about what the van needed and how it wasn’t going to get it in the middle of the mountains.

“You and Hunter,” Cam said suddenly, and Shane had nearly forgotten he was there. 

“What about me and Hunter?” he said. 

“Never mind.” Cam stepped around him, careful not to touch him, and that felt odd. Shane filed it away as something to address later – if at all – and Cam touched Tori’s shoulder to get her attention. “One of us could go and come back with whatever the van needs,” he said.

“I thought you said we’re not supposed to use our ninja powers in public.” Tori frowned. “In fact, I remember a lecture. And a bucket of popcorn.”

Cam stared at her, face impressively blank. “We don’t use our abilities in public for personal gain,” he said, which didn’t address the issue at all.

Tori apparently agreed with Shane’s internal monologue, because she looked annoyed. “How is this not personal gain?”

“We have to be available in case Lothor does something else,” Cam said. “Which is a lot harder to do from the middle of nowhere.”

“But it’s not impossible!” Dustin slung one arm around Cam’s shoulders and tugged him close enough to Tori that he could do the same to her. “CyberCam’s in Ninja Ops. He can call. You guys can stay and camp with us!”

“They don’t want to stay and camp with us,” Hunter said, over Blake’s “Come on, Tori, it’ll be fun” and Cam lost what little expression he’d had.

“No, we don’t,” he said, moving away from Dustin and Tori. “Look, just tell me what the van needs and I’ll be back with it.” 

“You’ll get the wrong one,” Dustin said, looking at his empty arm and then letting it fall to his side. “It’s tricky to -”

“I repair Zords,” Cam said sharply. “I think I can manage to find a part for a van.” 

“Dude, that’s not what I meant,” Dustin said. Hurt flashed across his face, fading for a moment and then returning. “I just meant someone should go with you.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Cam said, more sharply than before, and Dustin’s eyebrows drew together in anger.

“You don’t -” he started.

Shane stepped between them. “No one is going down the mountain on foot,” he said. Five pairs of eyes swiveled around to look at him. “The fog is coming in fast,” he added, “and there’s something in it.”

“I don’t see any fog,” Dustin said into the resulting silence, glancing from the horizon to the rest of the team. 

“Give it a few minutes,” Shane said, but the sky remained stubbornly clear, and the looks of skepticism surrounding him deepened. 

“Maybe the wind changed,” Tori said finally. “And whatever weather you saw from up there went somewhere else.”

“That’s not it,” Hunter said. “He thinks he saw a vision of the future.”

“Right,” Cam said, into the second awkward silence within thirty seconds. “Shane, get some rest. I’ll see you guys when I get back.”

“You’re not going down that mountain,” Shane said, folding his arms. He’d learned a lot, over the past several months, about how to use his physical presence effectively, and he pulled out all the stops now to radiate an aura of imposing authority. Cam, unfortunately, knew all the same tricks he did, and was thoroughly unimpressed.

“I can take care of myself,” he snapped. “You’re overtired and overreacting.” 

“I’m _not_ -” Shane started.

“Fog’s coming in,” Blake announced, interrupting them both. “Fast, too.” 

The edges of the trees were just starting to blur as the weather shifted, just as Shane remembered seeing it. The soft gray mist crept over the ground, not quite moving quickly enough to see. Shane pointed a victorious finger at it. “I  _told_ you,” he said. “It’s weird and there’s something  _in_ it.” 

“There’s nothing -” Cam said, and Tori spoke over him as though she hadn’t heard him at all.

“Why don’t I check with Ninja Ops,” she said, and CyberCam answered her question of whether or not the mist seemed supernaturally generated with a negative, as far as the sensors in Ninja Ops could tell. 

“Ask him to ask Sensei if he feels anything weird,” Shane prompted, but Tori had closed the channel. 

“Then I’ll see you guys in a few minutes.” Cam didn’t get more than half a step before Shane grabbed his wrist, unable to think of another way to convince him not to run off. “What are you _doing_?”

“It isn’t _safe_ ,” Shane said, desperate for Cam to understand. “I don’t know how else to explain it, but I saw it, and it isn’t safe.”

Cam’s face shifted, and he pried Shane’s fingers off his wrist. “Okay,” he said, glancing over Shane’s shoulder toward Tori and Blake. “Okay,” he said again. “I’ll stay. If you’re that worried, I’ll stay.”

“Okay,” Shane repeated. Relief that he’d averted at least one part of the catastrophe swept over him, and tugged loose another piece of memory. “Tori, your cell phone.”

“What about it?” 

“Get it out of the van now,” Shane said. “Before it’s too late.”

“Just do it,” Cam said in an undertone, and Tori sighed. “Come on, Shane.”

It didn’t matter, Shane decided, that Cam had apparently concluded that Shane needed to be humored, as long as it kept his team together, and he let Cam chivvy him toward the cabin. Tori caught up within a few steps, rectangular outline of her cell phone in her pocket, and slipped her hand into Blake’s. The fog thickened as they walked, the van’s outlines blurring by the time they reached the front door.

“That really was fast,” Hunter said, standing in the open doorway and looking around at the trees.

“I told you,” Shane muttered.

“Just go inside.” Cam sounded as though he were at the end of his nearly nonexistent store of patience, and Hunter ducked through the doorway with a grimace. 

Having the closed and locked door between the team and the mist made Shane feel a little better, and he turned on every light in the cabin as Tori started directing a much less chaotic version of making dinner than Shane remembered from the first time around. She even started sorting personal belongings onto bunk beds before coming up short against the idea that there were five beds and six people and someone was going to have to share. Shane ignored the byplay, standing next to the door and peering out the double window at the thickening fog. He couldn’t see anything moving in it, but the outline of the van had disappeared.

“Earth to Shane,” Tori said, snapping her fingers in front of his face.

“What?” Shane blinked. He thought he’d seen the van’s headlights come on, but the entire electrical system was dead. The twin lights remained, just slightly to the left of where he thought the van should have been, shining softly.

“We’re drawing straws to see who shares the futon,” Tori said. “Except me. Obviously.” 

“I’m going to stay up and make sure nothing happens,” Shane said. “I don’t need a bed.” 

“Shane.” Tori had caught Cam’s attitude regarding how Shane needed to be handled, apparently. “If Lothor starts something, Sensei and CyberCam will let us know.”

“Communication gets cut off,” Shane told her. “That’s why you have your cell phone.”

Tori gave up, visibly tensing. “Would you just pick a straw?” 

“Fine.” There wasn’t quite enough space for Shane to stalk across the room, but he took the two steps with as much rigid intensity as he could manage and yanked a makeshift straw out of Cam’s hand. It was a disposable wooden chopstick, something scribbled on the narrow end in ink.

“Bedroom, top bunk,” Cam said, glancing at the indecipherable scribble. There were only two left, and Cam stared at Blake for a few seconds too long when Blake picked one of them and pulled. “Bedroom,” Cam said, sounding strained, “bottom bunk.”

“You and me, then,” Hunter said to Cam, and Cam looked as though he would very much rather be somewhere else.

“I’ll switch with you,” Shane told Cam, tugging the remaining straw out of Cam’s hand and replacing it with the one he’d picked. 

“Right,” Cam said, glancing between the two of them. He didn’t seem reassured; if anything, he looked more upset than he had before, and Shane had no idea why. “I, uh, need some air.” 

“Don’t go outside!” Shane said, but the door was already closing behind Cam. Shane swallowed a curse and ran after him. The door stuck in the frame, and by the time Shane wrestled it open, Cam’s silhouette was no longer visible. “I’m not waiting for you this time,” Shane said, and spit out his transformation catchphrase as fast as his tongue could twist around the words.

The red glow along the edges of his vision accompanied the familiar rush of energy for the briefest of seconds before Shane felt the earth crumble under his feet again.  _What?_ He blinked and then blinked again as the weight of the armor hugged his skin and settled into it at the same time before dissolving entirely as he hit the ground with a jolt. The sun was in his eyes, and there was no fog.

“What?” Shane said, trying to figure out where he was. 

“I said, this doesn’t count as camping!” Tori’s voice was the same, inflections the same, and Shane swiveled his gaze to where she stood pressed against the side of the van. Dustin brushed past her, carrying a cooler toward the cabin.

“This isn’t right,” Shane said.

“That’s what I said.” Tori peeled herself off the van. “I’m glad you’re coming around to my way of thinking.”

“No, that’s not -” Shane couldn’t finish the sentence. The sky was the clear blue of late afternoon, studded with the same white fluffy clouds that had been there during his entire flight, and the sun hovered above the treeline. Tori’s van sat in the clearing, back doors wide open, and the rest of the team was nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, you ok?” Tori poked him in the shoulder. “Earth to Shane.”

“Something isn’t right,” Shane said, and Tori’s expression shifted. Her civilian persona melted away, and she glanced around the clearing to assess what had spooked her team leader. 

“I don’t see anything,” she said quietly, but the wary edge remained. “What’s going on?”

“No, that’s not – that’s the problem,” Shane said, and Tori’s wariness turned to confusion.

“Run that by me again?”

“It’s gone,” Shane said. The fog had been there, he had seen it roll in twice, and he’d thought he’d seen a vision of the future. “I mean, it’s not here yet.”

“Okay,” Tori said. “You definitely need the break.” She patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “I’m just going to see if there’s anything left in the van, okay? You go inside.” 

“No, that’s not going to help,” Shane said. “It’s happening again.” Either he was having repeated visions, or he was reliving the same few hours, over and over. 

“Um,” Tori said, now more worried than confused. “Cam!”

“I’m going to see if I can find out where the mist is coming from.” Shane stepped back, raising his morpher. The mist and the visions – or his inexplicable time travel – had to be connected, and maybe if he could get the team away from it entirely, they could figure out what was going on. “Ninja Storm, Ranger form!” he shouted, over Tori’s surprised protest. 

The same disorienting sensation of both wearing the armor and feeling it form around him swept over him for a third time, dissipating abruptly as he hit the ground with the sun in his eyes. Tori was gone, and Shane looked automatically toward the van. 

“You had a generator,” he heard Tori say to Dustin’s retreating back. “And a television.” She reached around the back seat for the last remaining cooler and followed Dustin into the cabin.

“What,” Shane muttered under his breath. “I can’t morph?” Just to test the theory, he raised the morpher again, seeing a split second of Dustin’s surprised face as he stepped through the cabin door before the same sequence deposited him hard on the ground with the sun in his face and both of his oldest teammates bickering goodnaturedly at the back of the nearly empty van. “This is ridiculous.” 

The keys were hanging in the ignition, Tori’s habit when parking the van somewhere safe or when she knew she wasn’t going to be too far away from it.  _I don’t like keeping the keys in my pocket_ , she’d said once, and when Dustin asked why she didn’t carry a purse, she’d just given him a disgusted look. Shane slid into the driver’s seat and turned the keys in the ignition.

The van’s engine coughed once and sputtered out. Shane tried again, but the engine made an unidentifiable noise before letting out a sad little whine and going entirely silent. “Come on,” he said, but before he could try a third time, Tori was standing next to the open door with a look of horror on her face. 

“You broke my van,” she said.

“I didn’t break it, it was already broken!” Shane protested. 

“It wasn’t! I was going to take it to get fixed!” 

Shane knew better than to point out the apparent contradiction. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “But we have bigger things to worry about.” 

“Bigger things to worry about? I’m stuck up here!” Tori poked him in the shoulder. “Do you have any idea how long I’m going to have to wait for a tow truck?”

“We can probably fix it,” Dustin said. 

“No, you can’t.” Shane wasn’t going to listen to that entire argument again. “You and Hunter are going to decide that the van needs a specific part, Blake thinks he can make a temporary fix and you guys don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Dustin looked at Tori. “Did I miss something?”

“No,” Tori said, eyes narrow. “Shane’s acting weird.” 

“I’m not,” Shane said, and realized how he sounded. “Okay, maybe I am, but I have a good reason, and it’s not important because we all need to go. Like, right now.” 

“Sensei called you and not us?” Dustin asked.

“He didn’t,” Tori said. “Wouldn’t,” she amended, and Shane shook his head.

“You’re not listening,” he said, and slid out of the van. “We all need to leave, right now.” 

“Dude, we just got here.” Dustin put an arm around his shoulders. “Chill.”

“There is something going on, and we need to get back to Ninja Ops to figure out what,” Shane said. “All of us. Right now. Before the fog comes back.”

“What fog?” Dustin said, over Tori’s soft query into her communicator. 

“Shane,” Tori said. “CyberCam says there’s nothing weird going on. Sensei says there’s nothing weird going on. The only problem we have is that my van won’t start.”

“I’m telling you guys,” Shane said. “We have to go. We need to get the others and get out of here.”

“Did something happen to you up there?” Tori asked. She circled around him, as though looking for signs of injury that Shane was hiding, or maybe just hadn’t noticed.

“No,” Shane said, frustrated. “I saw this happen twice, okay?”

“What do you mean, saw this happen?”

“Hey, Tor.” Dustin had disappeared, while Shane hadn’t been paying attention – _Dustin had disappeared, while Shane hadn’t been paying attention_ and the bottom dropped out of Shane’s stomach when Dustin’s face popped into view around the open hood of the van. He was doing a terrible job of keeping track of his teammates. 

“What?” Tori didn’t seem surprised, but Shane didn’t think she’d noticed Dustin vanishing either.

“He’s right.” Dustin held up something Shane couldn’t identify. “You need a new one.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Tori said, and held up a hand to forestall Dustin before he could launch into an explanation. “I don’t care what it is, put it back.”

“Okay, but it’s broken.” Dustin shrugged. “And the van’s not moving until it gets fixed.”

“I told you,” Shane said. 

“Okay, okay.” Tori patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s tell everyone else we’re going, okay?”

Tori’s apparent agreement to back Shane up didn’t stop her from making Dustin finish unloading the van, which took precious minutes. Shane eyed the horizon, searching for the first signs of the fog. He still didn’t know what direction it had come from; both times he’d seen it, he’d simply looked up and it had been all around them. Cam’s hand on his shoulder startled him badly, as he peered toward the trees, and Shane tried to pretend he hadn’t just shrieked.

“I mean,” he said. “Hi, Cam.”

“Tori says you want to leave?” Cam asked. 

“It’s not that I want to – Lothor is doing something,” Shane said. “There’s something in the fog.”

Cam looked pointedly at the clear sky. “And I thought I needed a break,” he said. “Shane, everything is fine.”

“Just because we didn’t grow up with this the way you did doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Shane retorted, the sentence making less sense out loud than it had inside his head. “I mean. I don’t know what I mean, but trust me, okay. When have I ever -” He stopped, at the skeptical expression on Cam’s face. “Please,” he said, and Cam’s face softened.

“If you two are done having a moment, apparently we have somewhere to be,” Hunter said from behind Shane. He was inexplicably sullen, looking between the two of them, more than Shane would have expected from an interrupted camping trip. 

“I’m really starting to hate all of you sneaking up on me,” Shane said.

“Ninjas are sneaky,” Dustin put in. “It’s what we do.” He adjusted his wrist guards, and Shane realized that he was the only person still dressed in civilian clothes instead of ninja gear. 

“Right,” Shane said, and switched. He felt better, dressed in the dark leather with its red piping, as if the outfit bolstered his ability to control the situation. “There’s fog coming in. There’s something in it. I don’t know what it is.”

“So we find it, and destroy it,” Hunter said. “Nothing we haven’t done before.”

“One more thing,” Shane said. “Morphing resets the – the – it just dumps us back at the beginning. We can’t morph.”

“What do you mean, dumps us back at the beginning,” Blake said carefully.

“I can’t explain right now. I need you to trust me.” Shane looked at each of them in turn, getting at least a hint of a nod of agreement from each member of his team. Cam was last, refusing to meet his eyes for several seconds before throwing up his hands and muttering that he hadn’t asked for this, thank you very much, and Shane bit his tongue before he could point out that Cam had wanted to be a Ranger so badly that he’d risked getting stuck multiple decades in the past when the rest of them had been temporarily incapacitated.

“Fine,” Cam said, breaking Shane’s train of thought. “You’ve fought without your Ranger powers before. It’s fine.”

Cam, Shane suddenly remembered, was newer to this than the rest of them, for all that he’d grown up more or less in the Wind Ninja Academy; he was both skilled and smart, and had very little experience either training against or fighting actual opponents. “It’s going to be okay,” Shane told him.

“Don’t patronize me,” Cam said, but there was no heat to the words, and Shane just rolled his eyes.

“Can we go?” he said, matching Cam’s tone, but the fog had rolled in while they were pretending to argue. Shane bit his tongue before he could curse at it. 

“Huh,” Hunter said. “You were right.”

“Of course I was right,” Shane said, trying not to snap. “Let’s get moving.” 

The sun was already outlined in what Shane now felt was an eerie halo; he’d thought it was pretty, the first time around, but now it felt wrong. He led his team into the trees, taking point. Hunter and Blake brought up the rear, with Cam in the protected center. He’d given Shane what might have been an unreadable look a year ago, but Shane  now knew him well enough that he could tell Cam was annoyed. 

The ground felt soft beneath Shane’s boots, sodden and yielding, and he almost expected to feel puddles of water every time he put a foot down. The fog thickened around him, sliding into his lungs, and Shane pulled his mask over his face. He felt better, with a barrier between him and the mist, even if it still brushed against his eyes and his exposed skin. 

Driving up to the campsite had taken a not insignificant chunk of time, and without using their ninja powers, it would take them most of the night just to get out of the woods. Shane kept a steady pace, without moving more than human-quick, at a jog that he knew all of them could keep up for hours if they had to. The only sounds at first were the quiet breaths and nearly inaudible footfalls of the group following him, and more than once Shane had to stop himself from turning around to see if they were still there.

“We should spread out,” Hunter said softly, and Shane nearly tripped in surprise. “Go looking for it.”

“It’ll find us,” Cam said. “Lothor’s monsters always find us.”

“Not always,” Dustin chimed in, as if it had been a signal that the impromptu radio silence was to be broken. “Sometimes we find them first.”

“All of you, be quiet.” Shane held up a hand. Had he heard something? He wasn’t sure, and it was getting darker under the trees. 

“Look.” Tori pointed ahead of them, to a faint glow, and Shane came to a halt. 

“I see it,” he said. It looked like the cabin had, the first time he’d seen the fog, and Shane turned slowly to scan the rest of their surroundings. “There.” He pointed.

Points of light were all around them, some brighter than others, and Shane wasn’t sure if they were moving or not. He had to stop himself from unconsciously aligning his mental route along the visible markers, because he didn’t trust them not to be a trap.

“It’s a trap,” Cam said, and Shane wondered if he’d spoken out loud inadvertently.

“Of course it’s a trap,” Tori said, on top of Hunter’s suggestion that they should spring the trap in order to find the monster already.

Blake derailed all of them. “Is that the cabin?” he asked, pointing. 

“We went around in a circle?” Dustin said, voice thick with disbelief, and took off toward what might have been the cabin in a quick jog.

“Wait!” Shane said, but Dustin’s outline was already fading into the mist. “Follow him,” he gritted out, and started to run. He didn’t wait to see if anyone else followed, but out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the team scatter. _Not that way_ , he thought, but it was too late.

Dustin cleared the trees just as Shane felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He tackled Dustin to the ground, skidding through the grass just as something sizzled through the fog where Dustin had been standing. It hit a tree instead, burning a hole through the thick trunk.

“Thanks,” Dustin said, sounding almost dazed. “What was that?”

“I told you,” Shane couldn’t help saying. “There’s something out here with us.” 

A second bolt hit the ground less than an inch from Shane’s outstretched hand and he bounded to his feet. “Make for the cabin,” he said, in a low voice. “I’ll collect everyone else.”

“Dude,” Dustin said reproachfully. He didn’t have to see anything else, but Shane could already see him opening his mouth.

“Fine,” Shane growled, before Dustin could start telling him that they were a team. “You get Tori and Cam, I’ll get Hunter and Blake, we meet at the cabin.”

Dustin nodded once, sharply. “Yo, Tori! Cam!” he shouted, and ducked sideways before the dampened echoes faded. Another bolt hit the ground where he had been standing, throwing chunks of dirt into the air, but Dustin was well out of its way. A second bolt and a third lanced through the air, safely away from Shane, and he ducked into the trees along where he thought the rest of the team might have run.

The glow of what could have been the cabin –  _and might be a trap_ , Shane thought – was steadily on his right, and Shane crept low to the ground. It wasn’t his element; he did better using the air as a lever to propel himself forward, but whatever was stalking them saw better than they did through the fog and Shane didn’t want to make himself into a target. He was nervous enough that when Cam materialized out of apparently nowhere, Shane nearly put a fist through his ribs.

“Calm down!” Cam hissed, but given that he’d responded to Shane’s assault by throwing him to the ground, Shane felt Cam had no room to talk.

“You first,” he said. “Where’s everyone else?”

“No idea.” Cam climbed off of him, carefully, looking around. “I thought I heard Dustin a few minutes ago, but I haven’t seen anyone else.”

Shane flipped over, pulling his feet underneath himself in the same movement, and stayed low to the ground. “This is a nightmare,” he said. 

“I don’t think that’s the cabin.” Cam wasn’t paying attention to him at all; he was staring speculatively at the glob of light that hadn’t moved. It was dimmer, now that Shane was farther away from it, but its line of three vaguely rectangular points of light were exactly how Shane remembered windows in the front of the cabin they’d rented.

“Everything is always a trap,” Shane muttered.

“No, because we didn’t leave the bathroom light on.” Cam pointed. “Middle window. See?”

“Unless someone made it back in there,” Shane said, and he felt rather than saw Cam give him a deeply skeptical look. “Fine, fine, let’s just find everyone else, okay?”

“Sure.” Cam hooked a finger under the edge of Shane’s jacket. “So I don’t lose track of you,” he said.

Shane opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it again. The mist was wreaking havoc with his senses, and he had no idea which way was up; it was hard to tell that Cam was there, and he was all but on top of Shane. “Right,” Shane said. “Let’s go.” 

Cam’s presence was a steady anchor, faint as it was. Shane crept through the trees, trying not to attract the attention of whatever had been shooting at Dustin and keeping the almost certain trap at the center of his search pattern. He listened carefully for any sign of his teammates in the dark, and still nearly tripped over Hunter before he knew the other Ranger was there. 

Lightning crackled weakly in Hunter’s palm for a split second, illuminating him just long enough for Shane to see all the wrong details before it faded out. Hunter was sitting with his back against a tree, one arm held protectively across his midsection, and the sharp scent of iron was strong even through Shane’s mask. He took it off, letting Hunter see his face. “Oh, it’s you,” Hunter said, sounding breathless, and Shane knelt beside him. Cam’s finger slipped out of his jacket, hand coming to rest on Shane’s shoulder, but Shane couldn’t even hear him breathing.

“Did you see it?” he asked. He could still feel Cam standing rigidly behind him.

Hunter shook his head and swallowed. “Came out of nowhere,” he said, with a pause in the middle as if to catch his breath. Shane put a hand on his chest, feeling Hunter’s struggle to breathe.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Shane couldn’t see it, in the dark, but he could feel the thick wetness seeping through Hunter’s fingers. “We’re going to get you help,” he said through the static fuzzing in his brain. Hunter was _dying_. 

“You don’t have time,” Hunter told him. “Get Cam out of here.” He gestured weakly with his other hand, and Cam pulled in a ragged breath.

“You need help first,” he said, and scrambled over to Hunter’s other side. It was loud, compared to the noise Shane had been trying not to make, Cam failing to keep his voice down to a whisper. “I’m not going to leave you here.”

“Yes, you are.” Hunter’s voice was stronger, for all that it was still breathy and insubstantial. “You can come back for me, when you’ve destroyed it.” 

“I -” Cam’s voice broke off, and Shane thought he might have been crying. He was struck, suddenly, by the feeling that he was watching something intensely private, and there was no _time_ , not if Hunter was to have any hope of survival. If any of them were to have any hope of survival. He still looked away, standing and moving half a step into the dark to give his teammates as much space as he could. “I can’t leave you here,” he heard Cam say. “I wanted – I didn’t – You were supposed to -”

“Tell me,” Hunter said, “when you come back. I’ll be waiting.”

Shane heard the lie as clearly as if Hunter had shouted it. He turned back, seeing Hunter’s hand cupping the side of Cam’s face, Cam clinging to it like a lifeline, and then Hunter went limp. Cam froze, gripping Hunter’s lax hand so tightly Shane could hear it creak, and then put it down. “I’m going to kill it,” he said.

“Cam.” Shane reached for him, but Cam was on his feet and running, and the time that it took to process what Shane had thought he’d seen meant that he was just a little too slow. “Cam!” he said again, more loudly, but Cam was ahead of him now and Shane only knew where he was because Cam was shouting for Lothor’s creature to show itself.

Lightning arced through the mist, striking the ground with an ear-shattering burst of sound, and Cam’s voice cut off.

“You’re not going to get rid of us this easily,” Shane growled, and triggered his transformation before he remembered that it would just send him back to the start of the loop. He staggered as he hit the ground, sun in his eyes and Tori’s voice in his ears. “Are you freaking kidding me?”

“Geez, Shane, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you took camping so seriously,” Tori said, poking her head around the side of the van. 

“That’s not – everybody inside. Now.” Shane knew better than to grab Tori, but he put a hand behind Dustin’s shoulderblade and pushed him toward the cabin door. “You too, Tor.”

“What the – what’s gotten into you?” Tori frowned at him, but she wasted no time following directions. Dustin shrugged off his hand, still carrying the cooler, and Tori opened the door for him. “Guys! Team meeting!”

Cam’s feet were sticking out from under the entertainment center, both Hunter and Blake hovering around it. Hunter’s gaze was carefully fixed on the darkened screen, Shane noted absently in passing, while Blake was staring impatiently at Cam’s feet. “You have terrible timing,” Cam said, voice muffled.

“Out,” Shane said, tapping the sole of Cam’s boot. “We have a situation.”

The screen flickered to life, the familiar wash of sound pouring through the cabin, and Cam scrambled out from underneath the structure with a muffled exclamation. Shane grabbed the remote control and turned it off. 

“We have a situation,” he repeated. “One of Lothor’s creatures is after us, and it’s not something we’ve seen before.”

“Technically they all have something we haven’t seen before,” Tori said, leaning on the counter. 

“I think they have contests to see which one is the most ridiculous before they send them down here,” Dustin added.

“That would explain a lot,” Blake said. “Did we see that the last time we were up there?”

“Maybe,” Hunter said, grinning, and raised both hands for a fist-bump from the two idiots making light of the wrong situation. Dustin and Blake met him halfway, and Shane closed the door with more force than necessary.

“You guys don’t get it,” he said. “This is different. This is serious. Hunter _died._ ” 

“Uh,” Hunter said, looking down at himself. “Still here, dude.” 

“No, I mean.” Shane rubbed his face with his hands. “It hasn’t happened yet. This time.” 

“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Tori said hesitantly, straightening up and sliding over to make room. The tiny kitchen was crowded, with all of them in it, and Shane shook his head.

“Back up,” he said. “Just. Sit down.” 

“Whatever it is, it’s not that bad,” Dustin told him, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

“It _is_ that bad,” Shane said savagely, “because it keeps happening and I can’t stop it.”

“We’re a team,” Cam said. “We’ll fix it together.” 

“Would you all just listen to me?” Shane snapped, and the vaguely encouraging mutter that had started circulating around the room with Dustin’s remark died away to an offended silence. “Lothor,” he started, and explained the situation in as few words as possible.

“Time loop,” Cam said. Shane had never heard so much dubious skepticism packed into two syllables in his entire life; he could have pulled it out of the air, knitted it into a scarf, and gagged Cam with it.

“Like Groundhog Day?” Dustin asked, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“This is not Groundhog Day,” Cam snapped. “That’s a movie.”

“Oh, yeah, and Tori said Power Rangers were comic books,” Dustin returned, and Shane groaned.

“It’s exactly like Groundhog Day,” he said. “Except that it’s not six in the morning that the day flips back, it’s whenever I morph, I end up right back outside. When I landed after looking for the road.”

“So does that mean this is a punishment or a reward for using our powers for personal gain?” Dustin wanted to know.

“It’s -” Cam started, and then looked thoughtful. “You said Hunter died?” he asked, stumbling over the phrase. 

“It was brutal.” Shane folded his arms. “You were there.”

“Normally I would call it a punishment,” Cam said, and left the sentence hanging.

“So what do we need to do to break the loop?” Tori asked into the awkward silence. Hunter was the only one not looking at Cam, until Tori spoke, and then Shane caught him looking sideways at Cam’s fingers twisting nervously around nothing.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t still be in it,” Shane said.

“In Groundhog Day, dude had an epiphany,” Dustin said.

“Why do you know the word ‘epiphany’?” Tori asked. 

“I know things!” Dustin returned. “Sometimes,” he added. “But I don’t think Shane needs one.”

Tori stared at him.

“An epiphany,” Dustin clarified. “He probably needs to destroy the monster.”

“All of us can destroy the monster, okay,” Hunter said, from where he was pretending not to pay attention to Cam. Cam, for his part, was staring fixedly out the window.

“Can anyone else morph?” Blake asked, looking between Cam and his brother. 

“Guys, the fog just rolled in,” Cam said, over the top of Blake’s question. “It’s here.”

“How far does it go?” Tori asked. “All the way back to Blue Bay Harbor, or is Lothor just trying to keep us trapped?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said. “I don’t even know what it looks like. It kept coming out of nowhere.” 

“We split up and search for it,” Hunter said. “We have more chances to find it that way.”

“That’s how you died,” Shane said, and Cam flinched. “What? What did you see?”

It took Cam a moment to realize Shane was asking him a question, and he blinked in confusion. “Nothing but mist,” he said. “I can’t see anything moving out there. I can’t even see the van from here.”

“So we split up,” Hunter repeated.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” It was Cam who spoke, over Shane’s impulse to tell Hunter exactly the same thing. “It sounds like it can see through the mist, and we can’t. That puts us at a disadvantage, if we’re searching for it.” 

“So what, we just wait for it to come try to take us down?” Blake leaned over to peer out the window. 

“We take the fight to it.” Hunter crowded behind him, staring at the formless darkness, and apparently completely unshaken by his own death at the hands of a monster none of them had seen. “Like always.”

“They come to us. Every time,” Blake said, pushing Hunter out of his personal space. “It’s like you’re not even paying attention.” Hunter shoved back, and Blake stumbled into the glass. It occurred to Shane that they were incredibly visible targets, standing in full view of a double window, backlit by the ceiling lamp overhead.

“Turn off the lights,” Shane said, and there was a brief scramble for the walls. The cabin plunged into darkness, the mist outside giving off a faint glow all on its own. It was thicker in some places than others, Shane realized, swirling around on itself to make patterns just outside the glass. The porch railing just outside the door looked soft, indistinct from the window, and Shane had his hand on the door before he thought about it.

“Where are you going?” Tori asked.

“I have to destroy it,” Shane said. Lothor’s monster had come for him, specifically, during the first loop and he couldn’t swear that it hadn’t kept aiming at him every time. He wasn’t going to put the rest of them in danger.

“Dude, this is not Groundhog Day,” Dustin said from behind him. “It’s not all about you.”

“My loop, my rules,” Shane muttered, and Tori flicked his ear with her fingers. It hurt, and Shane flinched away from the door. “What was that for?”

“No I in team,” Tori said, and Shane groaned out loud. 

“I’m the only one it can’t hurt,” he said.

“You don’t actually know that,” Cam pointed out. “You don’t know what happens if you get hurt. Or if it kills you.”

Shane closed his mouth. 

“You’re the one we want to keep alive,” Cam went on. “So you can hit the reset button if something goes wrong.”

“You want me to look at this like a video game?” Shane said, blinking.

“It’s -” Cam started.

“Exactly like a video game,” Dustin crowed. “And Shane found the save button!”

“This is ridiculous.” Cam squared his shoulders and glared at the door. “Let’s try to figure out how to find this thing and destroy it, so we can all go back to our regularly scheduled lives.”

“Great,” Shane said. “Then let’s -”

“Who said we?” Cam said. “You’re staying here. Where it’s safe.”

Shane glared at him. “You have got to be freaking kidding me.”

“Try me,” Cam said, deceptively mild. 

“I knew telling you the truth was a bad idea,” Shane muttered, but it made sense to let his team take point in figuring out how to handle Lothor’s latest monster. He didn’t have to like it, but he could accept Cam’s instruction not to take unnecessary risk. “I’ll stay behind you guys, but I’m not staying in the cabin,” he said, and Cam sighed in resignation.

Three loops and Shane couldn’t shake the mental image of Hunter, dead on the ground in front of him. Not telling the team about the creature in the fog only got them killed faster, and Shane went back to explaining the situation as soon as he landed outside Tori’s van. It got easier, to argue Cam out of the idea that Shane should hide in relative safety, but he still couldn’t stop any of them from dying. 

Six loops, and no one had gotten face to face with whatever was in the mist; Shane tried to figure out how to remember all the details the other Rangers gave him so he could pass them on, but he kept feeling like he was forgetting something. No one could use their powers effectively without morphing, after the fog rolled in, and Shane was no closer to figuring out why. Twelve loops, and Shane was exhausted enough not to argue with Cam’s insistence that he stay in the cabin and wait. 

It took him far too long to realize that no one was coming back.

Shane waited, restless, tapping a foot against the floor with the cabin lights off, watching the front window. He paced, leaning over the sink to see farther out the kitchen window, checking both windows in the bedroom, wondering if he should go outside to check past the windowless east wall. The south wall was full of windows, the one in the bathroom sitting higher than the single window in the bedroom and the double window in the kitchen overlooking the porch, and he couldn’t see anything but swirling gray fog dotted with glowing lights.

The steadily growing fatigue – worse with every loop – pulled him downwards, and Shane didn’t notice when he slipped into a dreamless sleep. He couldn’t have said what woke him, either, the gray fog outside the window no different when he opened his eyes to the rough ceiling and a watch that fitfully blinked 12:00 at random intervals. Shane tapped at his communicator, knowing that he wasn’t going to get an answer from it, and it clicked once before returning nothing but the same static it had thrown at him since the beginning.

“Useless,” he muttered, unsure if he meant the communicator or himself.

It was still dark outside, but Shane had no idea if the sun was still down or if the fog was thick enough to blot it out entirely. He felt less exhausted, the feel of leaden weights under his skin given way to a restless urge to move. He paced from room to room, peering out each of the windows again – north-facing in the bedroom, south in the bedroom, south in the bathroom, south next to the kitchen door, west over the sink – and thought about going outside again.

“This isn’t helping anyone.” Cam’s plan wasn’t working. Shane took a deep breath and eased the door open, as quietly as he could. The fog swirled around his feet, leaving his ankles damp, and he stepped off the porch and onto the springy ground. 

The grass seemed thicker, and Shane aimed for the van first, in what was probably a vain effort to orient himself. He reached the treeline before he saw the van, and the line of three windows wavered behind him. He smirked at it, keeping low to the ground.

“I’m onto you,” he said softly. The lights had been off, when he’d left, and none of the others would have turned them on. Whatever was in the fog was creating hallucinations, mirages, playing tricks to lure them in closer. Shane listened, trying to feel with all of his senses, and came up with nothing but silence.

The fog drifted around the trees, leaving behind beads of water on the leaves and dampness on the bark. Shane touched one leaf with the tip of his finger, coming up with nothing. What little affinity he had for water wasn’t giving him any useful information, and the air around him was damp enough that it was like being blindfolded. 

The trees gave way abruptly, and Shane saw the dark shell of the cabin in front of him. He’d come out on its east side, the windowless wall looking austere and forbidding, and he knew he’d been moving west when he’d walked away from the door. “I know where Tori parked,” he said to the cabin, keeping his voice to barely more than a subvocal hum. “I know you’re trying to throw me off.”

Shane circled around to the north, to where the lone window in the long side of the cabin would give him a view into the bedroom, and saw the darker patch of glass cut into the wall. It reflected nothing. Shane moved toward it, cautiously, and peered inside. Nothing moved. He went around the other way, feet loud on the grass, and the door was ajar.

“I left you closed,” he said to it, just a little more loudly, and crouched down to push it open from underneath the window. A rock sailed past, just where his head would have been if he’d opened the door like a person who wasn’t expecting an assault, and clattered across the porch. The noise sent a frisson of adrenaline straight through Shane’s heart, and he rolled into the room and kicked the door shut before he could consider his actions. “Who’s there?” he asked, vaguely aware that halfway under the kitchen table wasn’t a particularly commanding vantage point.

“Oh, it’s you,” Hunter said, and Shane stood up.

“What do you mean, oh it’s you,” he said, and his eyes had more or less adjusted to the dark. Someone else was on the futon, and Hunter was slumped in front of it. “What happened this time?”

“I really, really hope you’re telling the truth,” Hunter said.

“Of course I’m – about what?” Shane moved toward his teammates and Hunter flinched. “Dude, it’s fine, it’s just me.”

“Yeah, no, I, uh.” Hunter ran a hand through his hair. “It, uh, Cam’s not okay.”

“Let me see.” Shane took a step closer and Hunter was on his feet by the time Shane’s heel hit the floor, one hand on the center of Shane’s chest.

“You can’t help,” Hunter said, and Shane looked down despite himself.

Whatever wounds Cam had taken were hidden by the dark leather of the uniform the rest of the team had made for him, and Shane couldn’t tell whether or not he was breathing. Hunter dropped to the ground again, movement devoid of his usual grace, and Shane moved cautiously toward him.

“I didn’t see it at first,” Hunter said. “It came out of nowhere.” 

Shane had a sudden vision of the day Lothor had announced his arrival, the destruction of the Wind Ninja Academy, and Cam crawling out from underneath the pile of rubble that had been their school. He’d had nightmares, once or twice, about getting to the school on time that day, and being powerless to stop Lothor. “You don’t have to -” he started.

“Isn’t this why we’re doing this?” Hunter said harshly. “So you can tell us what this is and I don’t have to keep the memory of -” He broke off. “I don’t want to remember this,” he said, voice small. “I don’t want to see him die again.”

“Then tell me what you saw,” Shane said. 

“This monster,” Hunter started, and grimaced. “Sorry.” He swiped a hand across his mouth, leaving a dark stain behind. “It’s using our elements,” he said. “I don’t know how.” 

“Using,” Shane repeated.

“Wind. Earth. Water.” Hunter shook his head. “Maybe lightning, I don’t know. But it was using our elements against us.”

“Great.” Shane reached for Hunter, pulling back when Hunter flinched uncharacteristically. “Did you see anyone else?” he asked softly.

“No.” Hunter leaned against the futon, resting his forehead on Cam’s shoulder. 

“I’m -” The words died in Shane’s throat. _I shouldn’t be in here, safe, while they’re out there. Not even if they don’t remember, not even if none of it ever happened once I hit the reset button. This isn’t right._ Hunter curled inwards, as if he could disappear if he tried hard enough, and Shane strode toward the door. 

The handle slipped out of Shane’s hands, sending the door crashing against the wall as he stepped into the fog. The sound was flat, devoid of echo, and the mist hung heavy in the air. Shane walked into it, boots firmly on the ground, closing his eyes and extending his senses as far as he could. The water in the air dulled his perception, and Shane narrowed his eyes.  _You’re not going to get the best of me this time._

Combining elements wasn’t an easy task, and working with an element without an affinity for it was close to impossible. Shane hadn’t learned, hadn’t had time to learn – if the Academy hadn’t been attacked, there were students who might have qualified for that sort of advanced class, and Shane didn’t think he would have been one of them. Lothor’s irregularly scheduled rampages meant that instead of honing their skills, they relied on the external power of the morphers.

“Which doesn’t help me now,” Shane muttered, and then he felt it. There was the slightest quiver, a depression of air pressure where nothing should have been, the currents of wind bending around something Shane couldn’t feel. It was disorienting, and Shane was so busy trying to lock down the sensation that he nearly missed it heading directly toward him. It loomed suddenly large and he threw himself to the side, eyes flying open, but it was too late.

The fog couldn’t hide the monster, not when it was close enough to grab him around the throat in a bruising grip. Sharp pain flared along his collarbone, and Shane reached for his morpher automatically before hesitating.  _No, I have to reset, I have to bring them all back –_ ran through his mind and his grip on the morpher firmed. The edges of his vision were starting to fade, and he couldn’t breathe.  _I can’t talk – I can’t morph_ , he thought, and this was how the loops were going to end. He’d failed, came the thought, and Shane rejected it. 

With the last of his concentration, Shane drew on the element of air and sharpened it into a potential charge of energy.  _You’re going down_ , he tried to say, but he didn’t have the air and it didn’t matter. He slammed his hand into the monster’s wrist, detonating the charge, and the monster didn’t quite let go. Its pointed fingers loosened just enough for Shane to suck in a lungful of air and spit it back out into the trigger phrase. “Ninja Storm! Ranger form!”

The outline of the monster wavered and dissolved, and Shane hit the ground with the sun in his face. The throbbing pain around his throat didn’t fade, and he felt something warm trickling down his chest. He reached up to touch it, fingers coming back red and wet. “Wait, what?”

“I said,” Tori said, and then looked at him from around the van. “Shane!”

“No, it’s fine, it’s just the – Cam was right,” Shane said. He still felt shaky, air thick in his throat, and dizzy. Trying to get a full breath was hard.

“Guys, we have a problem,” Tori said into the communicator. “Shane’s been attacked.”

“Not right now,” Shane said, trying to make her understand. “It was in the last loop.” 

“Loop?” Tori frowned at him, and Shane remembered that he hadn’t explained the loops yet. He was back at the start of one, and the rest of them had no idea what was coming.

“It uses our elemental energy,” he said. That was the key piece of information, what Hunter had fought to tell him. “That’s how it does it. That’s how it makes the mist.”

“Shane, come on.” Tori was trying to pull him toward the cabin, and that was the wrong direction. Shane resisted. Lothor’s creature was in the woods somewhere, and it was pulling together the energy it needed to create the fog. It had to be. 

“What the -” Dustin appeared on Shane’s other side, completely unexpected, and Shane flinched hard. “Dude, it’s okay, it’s just me.” Dustin didn’t do soothing well, Shane thought, and the world blurred into static.

Sense and sensation returned slowly, the rough ceiling of the cabin coming into view for the second time in Shane’s memory. The lights were on, reflecting off the mist beating against the windows, and he had a brief moment of panic that he hadn’t turned them off when the others had gone out to hunt Lothor’s monster. “No,” he said, voice catching, and his second thought was that he wasn’t going to let the team protect him any more. It wasn’t fair to them, no matter what Cam kept saying about keeping him intact, no matter how much objective sense Cam had made or how unanimous the rest of the team had been in agreement.  _They can’t go out there._

Before Shane got more than halfway upright, Cam pushed him back down. “You’ll start the bleeding again,” he said. “Hold still.”

“Bleeding?” Shane didn’t remember bleeding.

“Something got you, while you were scouting the road,” Cam said. “Everyone else is out looking for it.”

“No,” Shane said, and pushed Cam aside. The room spun around him before it steadied with the floor below his feet, even if it was still tilting a little. “No, they have to stop doing that.”

“Shane,” Cam said. “We’ve all done this before. None of us are new to this.” 

“That’s the problem! You keep doing this and none of you know what you need to know!” Shane still felt light-headed, thoughts slipping away from him before he could grasp what they were, and there was an odd tug below his left collarbone when he moved his arm. It hurt, suddenly, sending a burst of static across his ears.

“Sit down,” Cam said, and Shane didn’t think he had actually tripped him before shoving him into one of the kitchen chairs, but he couldn’t swear that Cam hadn’t, either. “Drink.”

The glass of orange juice was ridiculous. Shane opened his mouth to tell Cam where he could shove it, and caught sight of flickering lights in the fog outside the window over the sink. “Is everyone out there?” he asked.

“If I answer your questions, will you try not to die of blood loss?” Cam asked acidly. “The van broke down and we couldn’t reach anyone on comms to call an ambulance for you.” 

“I’m not dying,” Shane retorted. 

“Then drink the juice.” Cam folded his arms and Shane was reminded of Sensei’s implacable aura. He downed the juice, sure that it was going to make a precipitous reappearance and surprised when it stayed down. Some of the sense of unreality faded, slowly, and Shane felt a little more grounded. “Better?” Cam asked.

“Little bit,” Shane admitted.

“Good. Do it again.” 

Shane glared, with no apparent effect. “One of Lothor’s monsters is in the mist,” he said.

“It’s creating it.” Cam pushed the second full glass toward him. “You said it was using our ninja elements, before you fainted.”

“I didn’t faint,” Shane said, indignantly.

“Sure.” Cam tapped the glass, and Shane sighed.

“I didn’t,” he muttered, but the juice was helping. 

“Hunter figured out where it was,” Cam continued. “They went to go handle it.”

“How did you get stuck staying behind?” Shane would have bet that Cam would have swallowed glass shards before voluntarily staying out of a fight. 

“We drew straws.” The corners of Cam’s mouth turned down. “I think Hunter cheated.” 

“He might have a thing for you,” Shane said, before he thought about it. “He was more pissed off when you died than when Blake vanished.”

Cam stared at him for a moment, face unreadable. “I don’t know where to start with that,” he said, finally. “With the part where you think I’m dead, the part where you think Blake’s missing, or the part where you think Hunter has a  _thing_ for me.” He raised his fingers in sarcastic air quotes at the last phrase, and Shane buried his face in his juice glass before he could yell at Cam. “No, no,” Cam said, almost pleasantly. “Explain all of this.”

“It’s a time loop,” Shane said, and launched into the same explanation he’d given on the rest of the loops. It had worked every other time, the words familiar enough that he didn’t need to think about them before he spoke.

“Time loop,” Cam repeated, with an air of skepticism. 

“I’m not concussed,” Shane said.

“Would you like a lesson on how blood loss affects the brain?” Cam said, and then looked away. “Sorry,” he muttered. “It’s just a lot to take in.”

“It didn’t bother you that much any other time,” Shane protested. “You were just like, Oh, sure, it’s a time loop, stay in the cabin so the monster doesn’t kill you, Shane, you’re the one with the reset button.” 

“Did you tell me Hunter had a thing for me any other time?” Cam said, and then looked as if he very much wished he hadn’t.

“No, I -” Shane’s brain caught up with his mouth, and then his mouth got ahead of him again. “You have a thing for him, too!”

“I don’t have a _thing_ ,” Cam spit out, shoving his chair back hard enough as he stood that it toppled over. “It’s not a thing. There is no thing.”

“You do!” Cam’s sudden hostility in every loop in which Hunter had dragged Shane behind a closed door made perfect sense, in light of Shane’s new information. “You were jealous!”

“Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?” Cam stalked back to stare at him, grabbing Shane’s face and peering into his eyes.

“No,” Shane said. “Wait, that’s why he wanted to talk to me. He was worried about you.”

“You’re making absolutely zero sense,” Cam said. “I want you to know that.”

“I’m making perfect sense,” Shane informed him. “You just don’t have all the information.”

“And whose fault is that?” Cam asked. Shane wasn’t entirely sure Cam wasn’t acting difficult on purpose. 

“No, no, it’s cool, you don’t want to talk about Hunter, I get it.” The second glass of juice was empty, and Shane eyed the door. “He’s just out there, chasing a monster that killed all of you at least once, and we’re in here.” Shane glanced over toward Cam; easier to back up the team if Cam was on board with the plan, instead of still trying to make him sit still and do nothing.

“You’re so bad at this.” Cam looked at him. 

“But is it working anyway?” Shane stood, and the room only swayed a little before settling. 

“You can barely stand upright and you want to go out there and fight a monster that, and I quote, killed all of us at least once.” Cam sighed and lifted his communicator. “Tori, Shane’s awake. We’re coming to you.”

“But the communicators don’t work,” Shane said. 

“Mine does.” Cam tapped his amulet. “We couldn’t get around most of the dampening field, but the samurai amulet cancels enough of it out for me to get messages over short distances.”

Shane stared at him, feeling betrayed. “That would have been useful information eleven loops ago,” he said.

“I had to figure out how to link it to the communicator,” Cam said. “I had a lot of time on my hands, waiting for you to wake up.” 

“It couldn’t have been that much time,” Shane muttered. “Can you reach Ninja Ops?”

Cam shook his head. “Too far away.” He glanced at his wrist and frowned. “Tori, where are you?”

Static crackled for an agonizing second before Tori’s voice came through. “Getting our butts kicked,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun. How’s Shane?”

“Shane is fine,” Shane said, grabbing Cam’s wrist. “We’ll see you soon.” He blinked. “Wait, did you guys morph?”

“You wanted us to try to fight this thing without morphing?” came Hunter’s voice, over the top of Tori telling him to let go of her communicator and use his own, thank you. 

“But,” Shane said. “That resets the loop.”

Cam regarded him for a second. “Maybe that’s just you,” he said. “And the rest of us can use all of our powers.” He grinned, suddenly, and it was startling. “You’re learning a lot, this loop.”

“You’re way too happy about that,” Shane grumbled. “Can we just go, please?”

“I still think you should stay here,” Cam said, but he was opening the door. His armor flashed onto his skin before he cleared the porch, its solid green comforting, and Shane nearly activated his own morpher reflexively before remembering not to reset the loop.

“I’m done hiding,” Shane said, more to himself than to Cam. He extended his senses, noting absently that Cam was heading straight for where Shane thought the monster was. The occasional sounds of the rest of the team shouting echoed through the mist, seeming to come from multiple directions, but Cam didn’t waver. 

The monster was lunging for Blake’s throat when Shane got close enough to see it, taloned fingers glistening, and he barreled into it without pausing. It barely staggered, but Blake took the opportunity to duck sideways and the monster’s hands clicked shut on empty air. “Take that!” Shane said, and the monster batted him into a tree.

The back of Shane’s head hit the wood and the world wavered around the edges, thick glass obscuring his vision and the rigid lines of the tree trunk tilting at a sharp angle. He struggled upward, none of the sounds making sense, and the monster filled his vision. He aimed for what might have been a vulnerable spot and tried to fling as much elemental energy at it as possible, but his power wouldn’t gel and the blast was weaker than it should have been. The monster shifted to the left anyway and Shane found himself staring at the ground.

_Where’s the sky_ , he found himself thinking, as gravity pulled him in one direction and his eyes told him he should have been moving in another direction entirely.  _This isn’t right._

“Shane!”

Mist and sky streamed across his eyes, dark shadows flashing faster than he could see them, and something heavy pressed against his right side. It held him fast at the hip, shoulder, and knee, dragging his head against his arm, and he could smell the scent of pine sap. Shane blinked, some of the stickiness behind his eyes loosening into fluidity, and he thought he might be able to ask a question. Before he could figure out how to get the words to his mouth, his perspective abruptly shifted again, and the weight dragged at his back. There was nothing above his eyes except fog, until Dustin’s helmet popped into view.

“Dude, you okay?” 

It was Dustin’s voice, but his mouth wasn’t moving. Shane blinked at him for a moment before it occurred to him that Dustin’s mouth was behind his helmet, and of course he couldn’t see it. Dustin complicated the manner by opening the face guard and looking worried.

“Shane,” he said.

“I’m okay.” Shane gave him a shaky thumbs-up, almost surprised that both his mouth and his hand cooperated when he wasn’t entirely sure how to make either one of them work. 

“Stay here,” Dustin said, and the face guard slipped back into place. Dustin bounded off toward something Shane couldn’t see, and the earth shook. 

_Right. Ground down there. Sky up there. I’m in the middle._ Shane levered himself upright, feeling his thoughts begin to flow more freely.  _The rest of the team is fighting, and I can’t morph._ Dustin hadn’t moved him far, and the rest of the team wasn’t doing badly. The monster was hunched over, and the Wind Rangers were combining weapons for a final strike. Blake and Hunter were on one side, Thunder Blaster at the ready, and Cam on the other with the Lightning Riff Blaster.

Energy crackling along the array of weaponry should have been the precursor to a very dead monster, or at least one that was about to need attention from the Zords. Shane sincerely hoped that for once, Lothor wouldn’t enlarge his monster; an ache was spreading out from where the back of his head had hit the tree, gripping his temples in a vise, and he just wanted to sleep. The monster shifted, and Shane frowned. It wasn’t holding itself like a creature that was about to get blown up.

“You’re trying to -” he said, and the words failed him. The monster was readying its own energy blast, one that his teammates weren’t prepared for. Shane took a breath and started focusing his own elemental energy. He had one shot to distract the monster, one chance to knock it off balance and let his teammates take it down. It had never been so difficult to call the power of air, but he pulled it together and ran. 

The blast of air didn’t fly quite true; it clipped the monster instead of striking it head-on, but the monster staggered sideways and its bolt of energy arced upwards over the Rangers’ heads instead of right into their midst, and Shane dropped to his knees, breathing heavily. 

“Now!” he heard Hunter shout, and three separate blasts hit the monster at once. It exploded, roll of orange flame spreading instead of dissipating, the mist flashing into bright heat and vanishing into the faint scent of smoke. Shane blinked, spots in front of his eyes, and the sun shining into them.

“Not again,” he said, but the light was coming through the trees, from just over the horizon, and some part of his brain told him that it was dawn.

Tori and Dustin jogged toward him, and Shane sat back on his heels. He wasn’t sure he could stand up, and Tori crouched in front of him. Her armor melted away, a dizzying sight at the best of times, and Shane groaned at the sudden disorientation. “Hey,” Tori said.

“Time to call the Zords,” Shane muttered. It happened every time.

“Not so far,” Dustin said. “Nothing. Pfffft.” He gestured with a bright yellow arm, and then his armor fell away, too. Shane looked away, hastily, until Dustin’s outline settled into his Academy uniform. 

“Come on,” Tori said, and helped him to his feet. 

“Zords,” Shane said again.

“Guess not,” Tori said, after a long pause. Shane thought he heard birds chirping in the background, and couldn’t tell whether or not they were real or if his ears were ringing. “Even the birds think so,” Tori added. “Listen.”

“Oh, good, they’re real.” Shane dragged a hand across his face. “I wasn’t sure.” 

“And we’re going back home,” Tori said, after a conversation that Shane couldn’t follow at all. He wasn’t even sure who she was talking to.

“Van’s broken,” Shane pointed out, but apparently Tori had a solution to that. Shane just couldn’t figure out what it was; the next thing he saw clearly was a white ceiling, and then he was in Ninja Ops in one of the small side rooms used for rest and recovery. The door was half open, but Shane couldn’t see anyone outside of it.

The walls stayed put when Shane swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and sat up, a trace of dizziness flickering through him and then fading. The top bunk was empty, when he stood up and looked, and he was wearing his own pajamas. Shane blinked, wondering exactly who had dressed him in his pajamas, in Ninja Ops, and then wondered if he was actually awake.

Low voices from the other side of the door caught his attention, and Shane peered around it. He couldn’t see Sensei’s habitat from his vantage point, but Hunter and Cam were sitting at the low table in the center of the room. Both of them had their backs to Shane’s open door, and he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Cam was leaning on Hunter’s shoulder, and Shane stared for a long moment, sure he was hallucinating.

“It’s time,” Hunter said, and the bottom dropped out of Shane’s stomach. He couldn’t have said why the phrase triggered a sense of dread, but adrenaline started to burn away the sense of calm, and he was almost surprised when Cam simply nodded and stood up. Cam’s hand was tangled in Hunters, and Shane saw him squeeze before he let go and turned around.

“Shane,” Cam said, obviously surprised. Hunter scrambled to his feet, looking as though he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been.

Shane waved. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing’s wrong.” Cam approached him, projecting an aura of relaxed quiet. “You’re in Ninja Ops.”

“Dude, I know where I am.” Shane stayed in the doorway. “You’re the one being weird.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Cam produced a light from parts unknown and shone it in Shane’s eyes. Shane batted it aside.

“Um.” He had to think about it. “The mist,” he said. “You guys were looking for Lothor’s monster.” 

“You don’t remember us destroying it? Or you morphing after that?” Cam asked.

Shane shook his head.

“Hospital?” Hunter put in, from just behind Cam. He put his chin on Cam’s shoulder, and Shane stared at the bizarre sight long enough that Hunter started to look worried.

“What hospital?” Shane asked, when it became clear that Hunter wasn’t going to move and Cam wasn’t going to make him.

“Coming back here?” Cam asked.

“The woods,” Shane said. “That’s it.” 

“Do you remember telling me about the time loops?” Cam asked.

“Yes.” That much, Shane was sure of, but most of whatever had happened after he’d followed Cam into the fog was a blur. “You’re sure I morphed?” he asked.

“You were very determined to make sure the loop wasn’t going to reset,” Cam said. “Your words, not mine.” He paused. “Do you know why you kept bouncing back in time?”

Shane shook his head.

“The energy from Skyla’s upgrade to your morpher interacted with the elements and a scrap of the time scroll.” Cam grimaced. “I’m sure none of it is left, this time.”

“The time scroll?” Shane blinked. “Isn’t that how you went back to get your amulet?”

“The monster was supposed to loop,” Cam said. “I think. But something went wrong, and you ended up dragged into the loops along with it. Or instead of it. It’s hard to say.”

“We told you this last time,” Hunter said, finally standing up straight. He left a hand on Cam’s waist, and Shane still wasn’t sure he wasn’t still asleep. “And the time before,” Hunter added.

“No, you didn’t.” Shane folded his arms. “This didn’t happen in the last loop.”

“He means an hour ago.” Cam threw an arch glance at Hunter. “The last time you woke up.” 

“Whatever.” Shane pointed at Hunter’s hands. “What’s that?” 

“What’s what?” Hunter’s face was abruptly closed-off, without his having so much as twitched, a pleasant blankness that projected distance so hard Hunter might as well have been screaming.

“That.” Shane wiggled his fingers. “You two.”

“You got a problem?” Hunter asked, the nonchalance slowly bleeding into outright hostility.

“No?” Shane hazarded. It didn’t help, and Shane tried again. “Dude, you can do who you want. What you want. That wasn’t on purpose.” The corner of Cam’s mouth twitched, and Shane couldn’t tell if it was in amusement or Cam’s very finite store of patience running out again. 

“Shane is the one who said you had a thing for me,” Cam said, looking sideways at Hunter, and now Shane was sure he was amused and not annoyed.

“A thing,” Hunter said. “Very descriptive.” The hostility was fading, and Shane rubbed his face. His head still hurt, and finding that two more of his teammates had paired off wasn’t helping his sense of stability.

“Is the monster gone?” Shane asked. He suddenly wasn’t sure the topic had come up at all, during any part of the conversation. 

“Yeah,” Hunter said, after a pause. “You morphed. No more loops.”

“I know that,” Shane said, feeling a spark of irritation. He remembered Cam saying that much, at least. 

“Maybe you should go sit down,” Cam suggested, in the voice that meant he wasn’t making a suggestion so much as instructing in no uncertain terms. Shane went, seeing Sensei’s habitat on the other side of the table.

“When did you get here, Sensei?” The words weren’t as polite as they should have been, and he winced as soon as he said them. “I mean, I didn’t see you.”

“I am glad to see you are feeling better.” Sensei’s voice was kind, and Shane smiled a little. “We will discuss your return to team activities tomorrow.”

“Return,” Shane started, but the rest of the team poured down the stairs and through the door before Shane could protest the fact that he’d been temporarily removed from the active roster, no matter how much he could have sworn he’d been run over by an actual truck.

“Is he better?” Dustin asked. “Are you better?” 

The general noise and clamor, enough for a crowd far larger than the three people crossing the floor, made Shane’s head hurt worse, and he was grateful when Tori finally shushed the rest of the team into something resembling quiet. “Stop harassing him,” she said, staring at Dustin specifically, and then pointing at Blake without looking. 

“I didn’t -” Blake started, and Tori’s finger twitched. Blake stopped talking. 

“I’m okay,” Shane said. “I’m – yeah.” He’d ended up sandwiched between Tori and Dustin, with Blake on Tori’s other side. Cam was still stuck to Hunter’s side, and Sensei’s habitat was still directly across from Shane. The little vertical lines made his head hurt, and he put it down on his folded arms.

“You sure?” Dustin asked, irrepressible, and poked him in the shoulder. “You look terrible.”

“I don’t care.” The table was nice, and he was going to leave his face on it forever. Shane sat up instead, letting the room settle into place. “Guys,” he said. “I need to say something.”

“You’re not dying,” Cam said, without missing a beat. “I have your discharge instructions.”

“I – what?” Shane stared at him for a long moment, completely thrown by the non sequitur. “No,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Cam muttered.

“That’s not – I meant I’m sorry,” Shane said. “To all of you.”

“For what?” Tori asked, when it became clear that none of them had any idea what Shane was apologizing for.

“I got you all killed,” Shane said. “More than once. I didn’t do my job properly. I didn’t keep you safe.”

“Shane,” Sensei said, gently. “You did as much as you could.”

“I told everyone not to morph,” Shane said. “And it made everything worse. Over and over and over. I let you guys down.”

“Yes, we’re all sitting here unhurt, and you’re the one with a hole in his chest and a concussion,” Cam said, condescension and sarcasm dripping off every word. “Clearly you did a terrible job.” 

“It’s not funny,” Shane said. “I should have – I screwed up, and I’m sorry, and would you just accept it?”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Tori said. 

“No, seriously, I don’t remember dying, it’s cool.” Dustin bumped his shoulder. “Whatever you did, it was right for the situation, you know?” 

“But,” Shane started.

“Shane.” Sensei hopped off his rolling habitat and paced gravely across the table. It should have been ridiculous, the hamster in its tiny robe, but Shane sat up straighter. “No person is without error.”

“But,” Shane said again.

“It is what you learn from your mistakes that determines how well you have handled yourself,” Sensei said. “The one who makes no mistakes knows nothing.” 

“But what if – we were so lucky,” Shane said. “If the monster hadn’t had the time scroll, or it hadn’t broken my morpher in exactly the right way. I should have done better.”

“Please,” Hunter said. “If we’d never been lucky, none of us would be standing here right now.”

“Yeah, but,” Shane said.

“We forgive you,” Tori interrupted. “For whatever it is you did that we don’t remember, that didn’t have any lasting effects, we forgive you.”

“Okay, when you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous,” Shane said. It was possible, he thought, that he hadn’t screwed up as badly as he thought he had; he just had to learn, going forward, take what had gone wrong and figure out how to make it right the next time. “Thanks, guys.” 

“Oh, sure, you listen when she says it,” Cam said, half under his breath. Hunter gave a quiet laugh and put an arm around Cam’s shoulders. Cam leaned into it, still grumbling. 

Shane was surprised by how much it felt as though the two of them had been close ever since they’d all met. It had taken a little longer to get used to Tori and Blake standing in each other’s personal space, for all that they’d been dancing around their mutual feelings for the better part of a year.

“Hey,” Tori said, and Shane blinked. “What’d you have against me and Blake?”

“He was evil,” Shane said.

“For like, two seconds,” Blake protested. “Lothor lied to us.” 

It occurred to Shane that Tori hadn’t been psychic when he’d woken up that morning. “Why do you know what I was thinking?” he asked. 

“Dude,” Dustin said, leaning over, and whispering in a voice the entire table could hear. “You said all of that out loud.” 

“No,” Shane said.

“Yes,” Dustin confirmed. “Hey, if these two are a thing,” he pointed to Tori and Blake, “and those two are a thing,” he pointed to Cam and Hunter, “then it’s just you and me left, bro.”

“Dude,” Shane said. “You’re my bro and I’m not going out with you.”

Dustin gave him a wounded look. “That is so not what I meant.” He paused. “Besides, you’d be lucky to score someone like me.”

Shane dropped his head back on the table, where he should have left it all along. “I would, but I still don’t want to date you.” 

Tori patted the back of his head sympathetically, and Shane hissed in pain. “Oops,” Dustin said, and it hadn’t been Tori after all. “It’s okay,” he added. “It’s not like we’re going to be alone forever.”

Shane groaned out loud. “I should have left you all in the loops,” he said. “You’re terrible.” 

“I’m pretty sure you like us, dude.” Dustin didn’t have to be visible for his grin to be perfectly clear. It was etched into every syllable.

“Ugh.” Shane couldn’t help the smile. “I’m going back to sleep.” 

The rest of the team filed back out of the conference room with varying degrees of quiet, promising to let him know if anything came up that needed his help. Shane didn’t point out that he was the one staying in Ninja Ops and would therefore probably be the one telling them; Sensei was giving him a serene look that promised exactly the opposite.

“Are you more at ease?” Sensei asked, when the room was quiet again.

Shane’s headache had eased a little, as the noise had faded. “I guess,” he said. “I know we’re a team, I just – I feel responsible, Sensei.” 

“As the leader, your burden is heavier,” Sensei said, and there was a kind of understanding that Shane both heard for the first time and knew Sensei had been extending to him since the beginning. 

“But if I believe in my team, it’s easier?” Shane said. “And learn from my mistakes, and – how do you do this, all the time?”

It wasn’t often that Shane got to see a guinea pig smile, but apparently today was special. “When you know that,” Sensei said, “you will be me.” 

For words that made no sense, they were obscurely comforting. Shane shuffled back into the recovery room with the feeling that no matter what Lothor threw at them, they would be able to overcome it as a team. A sense of calm settled in, but Shane thought it was the kind of calm that came before a storm.

_I won’t let anyone down. Not next time._

END

**Author's Note:**

> If you got this far, thank you for spending your time here; I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing.


End file.
